Microsoft’s Bob Ward has a new post up on the CSS SQL Server Engineers blog about a change in their lifecycle support policy for unsupported service packs of products that are still in mainstream support. Previously, Product Support could not help you in this situation unless you had purchased a… Read more

Returns information about all the waits encountered by threads that executed. You can use this aggregated view to diagnose performance issues with SQL Server and also with specific queries and batches.

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie had a good post up yesterday that highlights some of the new features in Visual Studio 2010. After some initial issues downloading the iso file early yesterday, I was able to get it downloaded and installed as you see below.

Microsoft has made the RTM bits for the various versions and components of Visual Studio 2010 available on MSDN Subscribers as of 9AM Pacific time this morning. Mary Jo Foley has some details here. Unfortunately, it looks like their download infrastructure is getting slammed, since I, (and quite a… Read more

Just in case you’ve just joined me, I decided on April 1 to post a different DMV query every day for the month of April. People seem to be enjoying the series, so that gives me added motivation to keep going. Fellow SQL MVP Paul Randal (blog | twitterRead more

Returns summary information about groups of missing indexes, excluding spatial indexes. Information returned by sys.dm_db_missing_index_group_stats is updated by every query execution, not by every query compilation or recompilation. Usage statistics…

This screenshot goes in the category of “geek porn”… It shows an IA64 system with 256 logical processors and 512GB of RAM, running at 72% CPU utilization. It is obviously running SQL Server 2008 R2 on Windows Server 2008 R2, since earlier versions of Windows Server and SQL Server are… Read more

Returns counts of different types of index operations and the time each type of operation was last performed. Every individual seek, scan, lookup, or update on the specified index by one query execution is counted as…

Microsoft’s Dan Reger has announced that Microsoft will not be supporting the Itanium architecture after Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Visual Studio 2010. Mainstream support for Itanium on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will end on July 9, 2013.

Returns a row for every automatic page-repair attempt on any mirrored database on the server instance. This view contains rows for the latest automatic page-repair attempts on a given mirrored database, with a maximum of 100…

Returns memory information from the operating system. SQL Server is bounded by, and responds to, external memory conditions at the operating system level and the physical limits of the underlying hardware. Determining the overall system state…